Cannes Film Festival opens on Wednesday with a blend of art-house movie making and raw star power appropriate for cinema’s best showcase, which turns 60 this year.
Chinese director Wong Kar Wai, best known in the West for ‘In The Mood For Love’, brings ‘My Blueberry Nights’ to the palm-lined Riviera resort, an English language film starring singer Norah Jones in her screen debut alongside Jude Law.
The opening movie kicks off 11 hectic days of networking, deal making and partying among thousands of people from across the industry that descend on Cannes each year.
It is one of 22 competition films, but hundreds more, including major Hollywood productions, are screened and touted, luring the likes of Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese and Sharon Stone to France`s southern coast.
Selectors chose no less than five U.S. productions in the main competition, although two have already been released in their home country to a cool reception.
Quentin Tarantino, adored by the Cannes faithful for his subversive style, presents ‘Death Proof’, part of a double bill that flopped at the box office.
And David Fincher was included for ‘Zodiac’, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr. in a drama based on a real-life serial killer.
Jay Weissberg, movie critic at trade publication Variety, said:
Often there is that disconnect between what American critics like and what European critics like, so it could be that the Europeans ... think it (Death Proof) is the bees’ knees.
Image Source: moldova
Via: BBC
